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Booking.com launches pilot for destination experiences bot

Booking.com launches pilot for destination experiences bot

Chatbots are coming to the last frontier of the travel industry. Booking.com plans to bring artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces to a realm of hospitality that was thought to be the sole domain of humans with local knowledge: destination experiences.

Today at MobileBeat 2016,
Booking.com unveiled what it calls Booking Experiences, a service that will
help people decide what to do once they arrive at their destination. “The real
question [facing a traveler] is what should I do when I get to a destination?”
said Anne-Sophie Liduena, VP of product for Booking.com.

The new service will
leverage A.I. and machine learning to present personalized recommendations from
an exhaustive list of local events and attractions, and enable people to
purchase tickets or make reservations from within Booking.com’s mobile app.

“Bots and AI are
empowering us to interact with our surroundings,” Liduena said. “We can be
provided with highly relevant suggestions to enhance our daily lives.”

Booking Experiences is
available July 13, 2016 on both the Android and iOS versions of the Booking.com
app for Amsterdam. The pilot launches for Paris, London, and Dubai at the end
of July and will go live for New York this fall.

Booking.com has been
pressing forward with bots and A.I. over the past year. In February, the
company unveiled hotel recommendations tailored to travelers’ passions, and in
May it launched a chatbot to connect hotels and travelers.

It’s not alone, however.
For instance, in June, Expedia launched its first bot, which is dedicated to
booking hotels. And today, also at MobileBeat 2016, newcomer SnapTravel
launched with a half-bot, half-human hotel-booking service.

Bookings Experience will
use data from the millions of trips made with Booking.com, combine it with
travelers’ personal preferences, and then marry it to possible experiences —
everything from rock climbing to rock concerts — at each destination. The
company is no stranger to data, listing more than 974,000 hotels and accommodations,
including more than 474,000 vacation rental properties, covering over 93,000
destinations in 224 countries, and accumulating more than 97 million customer
reviews.

Booking.com is betting
that its trove of information, and the ability of a bot to continuously learn
from its customers, will provide them with the kinds of experiences and city
knowledge known only to locals.